Yesterday was international Redhead Day. I’ll bet you didn’t know we redheads have our own holiday, but we do. And it’s an important day.

Because countless redheads throughout history fought so that we, as a nation, could observe this holiday in freedom. Our ginger ancestors died protecting precious rights that many of us redheads enjoy today.

Such as the right to wear orange or burgundy; the right to be cast as the little orphan Annie in the school musical production of “Annie”; and the right to get free beer on Saint Patrick’s Day.

You probably know a redhead in your life. And speaking as a genetic minority, we ruddy complected persons could use your support right now.

Because redheads are disappearing.

That’s right. Modern research shows that the number of those carrying the recessive gene causing red hair are declining.

The percentage of redheads has dropped steeply within the last few years. At one time, the earth’s population of redheads was about 19 percent. Today it’s down to 2 percent. That’s barely enough to

form a jayvee basketball team.

We are diminishing in huge numbers each year. And each time we die, we take our genetics with us.

If this trend continues, by the year 2100 there will be approximately 3 redheads left including Willie Nelson.

I am a longtime redhead. My hair turned strawberry in my teens, but I was born with hair the color of Ronald McDonald.

I was also a jaundice baby, which means my skin was the color of sickly urine. My mother said I was also born with a pointy head. “You looked like a No. 2 pencil,” my mother recalls.

My mop of hair, however, was the main attraction in the delivery room. The first words of the nurse who delivered me were, “You know what they say about redheads and preachers…”

Unfortunately, nobody ever learned what they say about redheads and preachers because…

Tonight, I am in a band. I am only a guest musician. But the guys on stage are my friends.

It’s a great night. Bright lights are shining in my face. There are happy people in the audience. And I can’t think of many things I love more than playing music with my friends.

Bruce is on the harmonica. George is on the lap steel. Jack is on bass. Steven is on the drums. Another Stephen is on Hammond. Jerry is tearing the keys off his saxophone. Mike is playing congas. And I am playing piano.

There’s an old saying about bands. The quickest way to get the band to sound good is to shoot the piano player.

Old joke. One I’ve heard many times. But then, I’ve heard them all throughout the years.

Q: What do you call a piano player without a girlfriend?

A: Homeless.

Q: What do you throw a drowning keyboard player?

A: His amplifier.

I’ve been playing piano since age 9. The way I started playing piano was, my father bought an

old spinet from the classified section.

One December afternoon, Daddy and three of his fellow ironworkers hauled the piano into our home and put the instrument into our dank basement, just beside the water heater, beneath the framed embroidery which read:

“Watch ye therefore: ye know not when the master of the house cometh.”

My father bribed his friends to help him move this piano by paying them with beer. His friends were feeling no pain. As a result, by the time the piano got to the basement, the thing looked as though it had fallen down three flights of stairs. Because, of course, it had.

But it sounded great. I was over the moon to have MY VERY OWN PIANO.

Mama asked Daddy whether he was going to buy me piano lessons. He replied, “If the boy wants to play bad enough,…

The first concert I ever saw was the Oak Ridge Boys. I was 2 years old. Mama took me. I pooped my diaper while they were singing “Elvira.” My mother changed me at the foot of the stage as I was singing at the top of my voice. One of the Oak Ridge Boys gagged, mid-song.

“That’s Mama’s little musician,” said my mother, wiping my hindparts.

The next concert I ever saw was the “Grand Ole Opry.” My father moved us to Tennessee because he was building the GM plant in Spring Hill. Mama knew I loved music, so she carried me to “country music’s biggest stage.”

I remember seeing Jerry Clower. I remember a bluegrass group practically lighting their instruments on fire. I remember Minnie Pearl.

During the Opry performance, Mama stood me on the back of the pew so I could sing along. She kissed my cheeks and said, “That’s Mama’s little musician.”

Mama bought my first nice guitar. It was the first “fine” instrument I ever owned. A

Gibson. Student model, B-15. It was indestructible. You could use this guitar to tenderize meat. I still have it.

And it was Mama who bought my first piano on my 9th birthday. Mama bought a second-hand piano from the classifieds. She sent my father to pick it up. He bribed his friends to move the instrument with cases of free Busch. As a result, the piano was beat to heck.

I began playing piano in church at age 10. I was an accompanist. My mother was so proud. She always sat on the front pew at church and told innocent bystanding visitors that I was her son. “He’s our little musician.”

Throughout the years, I would go on to break my mother’s heart a million times. After my father took his own life, Mama became a single mother. She struggled to make ends meet, cleaning condos. I threw my…

Tomorrow is the birthday of a friend. He looks pretty good for his age. He’ll be turning 187. Which makes him almost as old as Willie Nelson.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, in 1835. It was late November, and colder than a witch’s underwire. His mother was not expecting him. She wasn’t even close to being ready, so she tried to squeeze him back in. But it didn't work. So out he came.

During childlabor, Halley’s comet was passing overhead, visible from the sky. The comet was a natural phenomenon that frightened a lot of people, causing many to either pray in tongues or drink whiskey. Sam’s mother did both during childbirth.

No, not really. I’m only kidding. Although, she had reason to drink. Because Sam was a lot of trouble.

For one thing, he was sickly. Nobody thought he would make it past infancy. Three of his siblings died. Being born premature in 1830s was no cakewalk. His body was puny. His complexion made Elmer’s glue look colorful.

“When

I first saw him, I could see no promise in him,” his mother recalled.

Even so, he was whip smart. Lightning in a jar. He could memorize things. He and he could talk the paint off a wagon wheel. And lie. Hoo boy.

Sam could lie like it was his profession. The kid was such a good liar, he received annual Christmas cards from Satan.

He got into trouble, of course. The best humans always do. Nobody changes the world by being well-behaved. History doesn’t care if you were president of your chess club or class treasurer. History favors the kids who lived in detention.

Sam was that kid. He started smoking when he was still in elementary school. He could out-cuss a grown man before he was potty trained. He skipped school so often that his teachers sent flowers to his mother and asked when the…

A no-name beer joint. Just off the highway. Somewhere outside Atlanta. Glowing Coors signs. Unlevel pool tables. I had been driving for several hours. I’d just hit town and my throat was dry.

I stepped into the dark room and made my way to the bar alongside the other hands. There was a kid playing music on a plywood stage. He had tattoos, a trendy mullet haircut and he wore his ballcap backward. He looked like a frat boy. He was singing what passes for country music in today’s melodically deprived America.

Then the kid started “country rapping.”

“Country music is dead,” said my bartender, who was pushing 70. Or maybe he was pulling it.

“The real cowboy singers have disappeared,” he went on. “I miss Willie Nelson, every day.”

He brought me a cold Pabst and asked what I wanted to eat.

“A burger,” said I.

He leaned onto his elbows. “We got vegan burgers, black bean burgers and chicken burgers.”

“Vegan burgers? I thought this was a beer joint.”

“New management.”

“But, I want a beef patty that’s

bleeding so badly it needs Band-Aids.”

The bartender sighed. “Don’t we all.”

The barman looked like a real cowpoke. He had smoker’s teeth. His skin was crepe paper. He wore a tan so rich he looked as though he’d been born in the Mojave.

His hands were veiny and rough. I know this because we actually shook hands. Just the way real guys used to do before the “fist bump” made us all look like schoolgirls playing Patty Cake at recess.

The kid strumming the guitar was still rapping. It was hard to watch.

The bartender looked at me. “They call it redneck rap. It’s all over the radio these days. Kids eat it up.”

“But it ain’t music,” said the guy next to me. He was wearing a crumpled suit. He looked like Fred Mertz after a long day.…

I was a kid. The “Grand Ole Opry” had recently moved to Opryland. My old man was working in Spring Hill, Tennessee, building the GM plant. We were living nearby. It was a July evening and my father was young. Younger than I am now.

My father came home from work one evening, covered in soot and sweat. His red hair was a mess from wearing a welding helmet all day. He had raccoon eyes and the artificial sunburn that come from wearing goggles and holding an oxyacetylene torch.

He announced that we were going to the Opry. Just me and him. To see Ernest Tubb.

Mama dressed me in red Dennis-the-Menace overalls, a Willie Nelson T-shirt, and teeny Converse Chuck Taylors. Then she combed my hair with one of those black nylon hairbrushes that shredded your scalp and gave you a subdural hematoma.

We piled into my father’s truck. It was an F-100, forest green, with a welding-machine trailer attached to the back.

It was a 40-minute drive into Nashville

proper. We entered the city. It was magnificent. The lights. The people wearing cowboy hats. The scent of French fries and pork fat in the air.

My father took me to get ice cream before the show. We sat outside on the curb and I spilled my vanilla on my Willie shirt. So he took my shirt off. I was bare chested beneath my little red overalls.

We pulled into the Opryland parking lot before showtime. We were walking into the building when a man approached my father. He had white hair. He was dressed in rags. He asked my father for money.

My old man never carried much money, for his own protection. Not protection against thieves, but protection against himself. “If I have money I’ll spend it,” he always said.

So he never carried much more than a few tens. He was a notorious tightwad. He was…

DEAR SEAN:

I have been going through a hard time since losing my mom and don’t know what I believe anymore. I’m not sure whether I believe in God or any of that stuff. I’m so lost. What do you believe in?

ANONYMOUS

DEAR ANONYMOUS:

You’ll have to pardon me. I’m writing this from my sickbed. Currently, I am sidelined with COVID and my body feels as though it has recently been assaulted with the wrong side of a pool cue.

As far as my beliefs, for starters, I am now a big believer in washing one’s hands thoroughly.

Also, I believe in fried chicken. The kind made by every granny you’ve ever known. The kind fried in black iron skillets.

I believe it is powerful stuff. Which is probably why you see it at funeral receptions, baby showers, and church socials.

I also believe in hand-rolled biscuits made from flour, fat, salt, baking powder, and buttermilk. To add additional ingredients to this mix would be like drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa.

I believe in teaching young men to

clean fish. I believe in kids who ask too many questions. And I believe in girls who are gutsy enough to be themselves.

I believe girls have it harder than boys. And I’m sorry for that.

I believe in giving money to the homeless—not once or twice, but every time I see someone down on their luck. Every single time. I believe in giving more than I should.

I believe in old-time country dances. Long ago, before TV’s, smartphones, and twenty-four-hour news channels, I believe people threw more parties.

I believe in bowing heads to say grace. I believe in crickets, loud frogs, and places where you cannot hear busy highways.

I believe in magic tricks. And in teenagers who haven’t found themselves yet. I believe in all golden retrievers, Labs, bloodhounds, some Jack Russels. And marriage.

I believe…

I’m sick. I am writing this from my bed with a thermometer in my mouth. My wife is making chicken soup, I have a fever, and every bodypart hurts. And I mean every bodypart. The good news is, it’s not a constant pain. I only hurt, for example, whenever I move.

We thought it was the flu, but then my wife tested me for COVID and the results came back positive. Although judging by the way I feel right now, we can not rule out bubonic plague.

So anyway, all this got me thinking about my own funeral.

I am not kidding. I have too many friends who have died unexpectedly over the last few years from various maladies, and in many cases, their families had no idea what their final wishes were.

And since I FEEL like I’m dying, I figured I’d take this opportunity to make some final requests.

Please have soft serve ice cream at my funeral. I once wrote a column about a sheriff in Geauga County, Ohio, who wanted

ice cream trucks at his funeral, and I think this is a good idea.

Also, I want my wife to know, publicly, that I want to be cremated. I want this for two reasons: (a) cremation is much cheaper than traditional embalming, and (b) you won’t need a permit to light my remains on fire.

Again, I am being serious. I have always wanted my urn placed onto a log raft, constructed of longleaf pines, placed in the Gulf of Mexico, and lit on fire. My childhood Sunday-school teacher, Mrs. Wilkes, always believed I would burn, anyway. So why not.

I know it’s an unusual request, but it’s my funeral.

Before the ceremony, I want everyone to put floral sprays and beautiful objects onto my raft, such as photographs, baseball gloves, cowboy hats, fishing rods, my guitar, and maybe some Atlanta Braves paraphernalia.

Then, I want…

The Choctawhatchee River is 141 miles of magic. You might think that sounds whacko, and you’re probably right. But I am just naïve enough to believe in magic.

The Choctawhatchee’s headwaters start as two separate forks, located in Barbour and Henry County, Alabama. The river then flows southward, snaking its way through Geneva County, lulling itself past the Florida line, finally emptying into the Choctawhatchee Bay of my youth.

The water undergoes many changes on its journey to the Sunshine State. Even the color of the river changes slightly as it slices through mud, clay and silt.

In some places the water is olive green. In other places the water can look more reddish, like iced tea. By the time the water spills into the 129 square miles of brackish bay, the water is almost silvery blue.

When I was a young sap, old men used to say the Choctawhatchee River was different from other tributaries. Not only is the water staggeringly clean, the river also contains some of

the oldest fish known to man. Among these species is the Gulf sturgeon, a frightening armored fish that traces its origins back to the Triassic Period, shortly after the birth of Willie Nelson.

These are wicked fish, known to jump right out of the water and assault fishermen. I know of a man who was knocked out of his boat and injured by a whopping sturgeon while he was eating a liver wurst sandwich.

So there is a special element that is unnamable about the Choctawhatchee. Using a fishing rod, I have spent entire summers trying to figure out what this unnamable charm is, but I have no answer except to say that, yes, it’s magic.

Which brings me to a recent example of this particular magic. A few days ago, near Hartford, Alabama (pop. 2,624), something happened.

A kayaker was paddling along the river and saw something stuck in the…